Rajneesh Quotes

The past is not clinging to you; YOU are clinging to the past. Once you are not clinging, the past simply EVAPORATES!

Trust life. If you trust, only then can you drop your knowledge, only then can you put your mind aside.

Silence is the space where man wakes up.

When there is no expectation there is no possibility of frustration. Expectation is the mother of all frustrations; expectation gone, frustration disappears. And when there is no frustration in your life, life really becomes a bed of roses. Then God is a constant blessing; he goes on raining his grace, his beauty on you.

Our whole attitude about life is money-oriented. And money is one of the most uncreative things one can become interested in. Our whole approach is power-oriented and power is destructive, not creative. A man who is after money will become destructive, because money has to be robbed, exploited; it has to be taken away from many people, only then can you have it. Power simply means you have to make many people impotent, you have to destroy them - only then will you be powerful, can you be powerful.

The perfectionist is another name for someone who is getting ready to become mad.

Creativity is always from the beyond.

Just a little detachment from the ego is needed.

The relaxation should not be a method. You should not relax through a Yoga posture. This very understanding is relaxing, this very understanding is relaxation. You relax, effort disappears. You live your ordinary life - you chop wood and you carry water from the well and you cook food and you eat and you sleep and you love and you live ordinarily with no hankering and no desire for anything extraordinary.

If you go and watch the way the primitive tribes live, you will know what work is in relation to celebration. They work the whole day so they can sing and dance with abandon at night.

The first thing to be understood: effort is needed, but effort alone is not enough - effort and then effortlessness, effort plus effortlessness. Effort precedes, and then effortlessness follows. Effortlessness is the peak of effort, it comes only when you have reached the peak

Wherever you feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful; death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world- meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.

The whole art of ecstasy, meditation, samadhi, is: How to become one with the rhythm of the universe. When it exhales, you exhale. When it inhales, you inhale. You live in it, are not separate, are one with it.

I have been continuously surprised by people who come to me and say they are afraid of love. What is the fear of love? It is because when you really love somebody your ego starts slipping and melting. You cannot love with the ego; the ego becomes a barrier. and when you want to drop the barrier the ego says, 'This is going to be a death. Beware!'

Any judgment is past oriented, and existence is always herenow, life is always herenow. All judgments are coming from your past experiences, your education, your religion, your parents - which may be dead, but their judgments are being carried by your mind and they will be given as a heritage to your children. Generation after generation, every disease is being transferred as a heritage. Only a non-judgmental mind has intelligence, because it is spontaneously responding to reality.

You are asking, 'Is the concept of soul mates more useful than marriage?' Concepts don't matter. What matters is your understanding. You can change the word marriage to the word soul mates, but you are the same. You will make the same hell out of soul mates as you have been making out of marriage - nothing has changed, only the word, the label. Don't believe in labels too much.

Tonight go to sleep as though your whole past has been dropped. Die to the past. And in the morning wake up as a new man in a new morning. Don't let the same one who went to bed get up. Let him go to sleep for good. Let the one who is ever-new and ever-fresh awake instead.

Love is your song - you can sing it any time. It is like breathing. Nobody is going to take it away from you; nobody can take it away from you.

There is no other revolution except consciousness. It cuts the desires from the very roots and it brings freedom to you.

Meditate, become more aware and then you will see: choices disappear, a choicelessness arises. And it is such a tremendous joy to have a choiceless spontaneity. It is such a freedom. Choice is such a burden.

Drop the fear. Fear was taken up by you in your childhood, unconsciously. Now consciously drop it and be mature. Then the life can be a light which goes on deepening as you go on growing.

From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.

How can the seed know that by dying in the soil it will become a great tree? It will not be there to witness the happening. How can the seed know that one day, if it dies, there will be great foliage, green leaves, great branches, and flowers and fruits? How can the seed know? The seed will not be there. The seed has to disappear before it can happen. The seed has never met the tree. The seed has to disappear and die. Only very few people have that much courage. It really needs guts to discover truth. You will die as yourself. You will certainly be born.

The man and the woman are not really two separate entities, but the personality of the man needs the supporting qualities of the woman. If those supporting qualities are not there, the man will fall apart. And the same will happen to the woman. She cannot exist only on female qualities, she needs male supporting qualities. So each human being is a composite whole of two polarities which appear opposed to each other but are not really opposed; they are basically, absolutely essential components of each other.

Don't try to understand life. Live it! Don't try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know - and all that knowing will come out of your experiencing. The more you know, the more you know that much remains to be known.

The innermost core is witnessing, awareness, watchfulness. You can call it anything, but it will be another meaning of witnessing. Truth is pure awareness.

Only silence communicates the truth as it is.

Relaxation is the point. And if you can relax with an enlightened person his enlightenment will start penetrating you, because when you are relaxed you become porous. When you are tense you are closed; when you relax he will enter

Start from the body, and then go, slowly slowly, deeper. And don't start with anything else unless you have first solved the primary. If your body is tense, don't start with the mind. Wait. Work on the body. And just small things are of immense help.

If you are happy, you are happy; nobody asks you why you are happy. Yes, if you are miserable, a question is relevant. If you are miserable, somebody can ask why you are miserable, and the question is relevant - because misery is against nature, something wrong is happening. When you are happy, nobody asks you why you are happy, except for a few neurotics. There are such people; I cannot deny the possibility.

To my understanding, sex is your only energy, it is life energy. What you do with it depends on you. It can become sin, and it can become also your highest peak of consciousness. It all depends on you how you use the energy.

If you love yourself, you love others. If you hate yourself, you hate others.

My friends, I tell you repeatedly that the illusion that Life creates is very, very intelligent. The illusion itself is intelligent! Just understand how intelligent the intelligence must be in order to create an intelligent illusion. The intelligent illusion is so intelligent it will appear real to man every moment of his daily life!

Hell is our creation, and we create hell by trying to do the impossible. Heaven is our nature, it is our spontaneity. It is where we always are.

The meditation I am talking about is not a meditation on something. If you light a lamp and remove all the objects surrounding it, the lamp will still go on giving light. In the same way, if you remove all objects from your consciousness, all thoughts, all imagination, what will happen? – only consciousness will remain.

Hence my insistence that music and meditation should go together. That adds a new dimension to both. Both are enriched by it.

If you come to a really religious man you will feel a grace around him, effortless. He has not done anything to himself, he has simply relaxed into the ultimate, and you feel the effortlessness around him.

And then certainly, whatsoever you do - your character, your behaviour - is yours, authentically yours. It has your signature on it. Then you are not a carbon copy, you are original. The Zen people call it finding the original face.

When all the faces have been rejected and emptiness is left, you have found the original face. Emptiness is the original face. Zero is the ultimate experience. Nothingness - or more accurately NO-THINGNESS - is your original face.

Meditation is the art of awareness. And once you are aware, out of your awareness your actions will arise - not out of conscience. Conscience is cultivated by others, by the vested interests, by the establishment. Consciousness is yours. It is individual, it is not collective. Conscience is part of the mob psychology. Consciousness gives you dignity because it gives you individuality. It gives you rebellion, it makes you capable of saying yes or no of your own accord. There is no foreign agency manipulating you in the name of religion, morality, etcetera.

Misery is nothing but the shadow of attachment. And hence all stagnancy. The attached person becomes a stagnant pool - sooner or later he will stink. He flows no more.

The real master is only a presence. He has no intentions of being a master. His presence is his teaching. His love is his message. Every gesture of his hand is pointing to the moon. And this whole thing is not being done, it is a happening. The master is not a doer. He has learned the greatest secret of life: let-go. The master has drowned his ego and the idea of separation from existence itself.

Jesus was a lover of life, a very affirmative person, but Christianity is life-negative.

If you are aware, you speak with awareness. But the awareness comes from the inward being. It flows from the inner being towards others.

Relaxation is one of the most complex phenomena - very rich, multidimensional. All these things are part of it: let-go, trust, surrender, love, acceptance, going with the flow, union with existence, egolessness, ecstasy. All these are part of it, and all these start happening if you learn the ways of relaxation.

Jesus must have been a really great artist in creating enemies because he was only thirty-three when he was crucified, and there were only three years of work because he appeared at the age of thirty. Up to that time he was with the mystery schools, going around the world to Egypt, to India, and the possibility is even to Tibet and to Japan.

Find godliness and good will come on its own accord. And when good comes on its own accord, it has a beauty, a grace, a simplicity, a humbleness.

What is envy? It is nothing but passive jealousy. Maybe jealousy is too strong a phenomenon; envy is a little passive. The difference may be of degrees, but it is not of quality, it is only of quantity. Envy can become jealousy at any moment; envy is just jealousy in progress. Mind has to drop all envies and jealousies.